Let the Blocks Fly (Flying Blocks): A Highly Efficient and Practical Consensus Protocol for Authoritative Blockchains

In recent years, blockchain has been increasingly applied to authoritative institutions (i.e., authoritative blockchains) to strengthen their authority and reputation by providing reliable and secure data to increase transparency, reducing fraud, and enhancing efficiency for distributed applications (DApps) like electronics certificate, land registration, and e-voting, etc. Blockchain systems in these scenarios often have the features of small node-size, high node-reputation and high node-performance, e.g., government blockchains. However, as one of the core technologies of blockchain, distributed consensus protocols are often designed for large-scale business DApps; their efficiency can be further improved when applied to authoritative blockchains. In this paper, taking into account the essential features of blockchain applications for institutions like government departments, we propose a consensus protocol known as Flying Blocks (FB) to further enhances the efficiency and practicality. FB combines the advantages of the delayed confirmation from Nakamoto consensus with the traditional voting-based BFT consensus to simplify the consensus process and reduce the network resources consumption. To evaluate the protocol's performance, we conduct comparison experiments with Hotstuff and RAFT. The results demonstrate that FB outperforms Hotstuff. Furthermore, to the best of our knowledge, FB is the first BFT protocol that outperforms RAFT, a CFT consensus protocol, deployed in Blockchain systems in terms of transaction processing efficiency.